On April 23rd, I will be doing a talk on my forthcoming book, hosted by the Centre on the Dynamics of Ethnicity (CoDE) at the University of Manchester. The talk is free, hybrid and open to all, whether in person or online – you just need to sign up here. The abstract is below – the talk is at 1pm UK time.
What are the relationships between sexual violence, sexual fear, social control, and surplus value? What is the role of sexual violence as racial capitalist systems corral, mould, use, and discard the workers they require? Sexual violence is key to the enclosure of bodies, and to the extraction of productive and socially reproductive labour. Sexual violence is a technique by which resources are expropriated, and communities and peoples terrorised and dispossessed. Sexual violence is also a pretext for the disposal of unwanted populations through criminal punishment, militarised border regimes, neo-colonial wars, and genocide.
This talk is based on the forthcoming book Sexual Violence in Racial Capitalism (Manchester University Press), which brings together assorted case studies including the Early Modern witch hunts, reproductive accumulation in transatlantic slavery, sexual harassment in drop-shipping warehouses and sweatshops, far-right Islamophobia and ‘anti-gender’ activism, the manosphere, and the Gaza genocide. It describes the coloniality of sexual violence, situating both acts of sexual violence and ideas of sexual threat within an analysis of racial capitalist property relations and the split colonial/modern psyche. It also argues that violence is necessary because power is incomplete: from bodily to planetary scales, resistance persists.
Alison Phipps 